January 17, 2019 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Gunfight Analysis: Tunnel Vision"--Sensible Self Defense (3 min.)

• First up, Grant Cunningham's Hump Day Reading List for this week.
• I may have posted this before, but if not: "Inattentional blindness for a gun during a simulated police vehicle stop"--Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2017 2:37.

• Related: "'I Spy With My Little Eye!': Breadth of Attention, Inattentional Blindness, and Tactical Decision Making in Team Sports" (PDF)--Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 2007, 29, 365-381.

• Related: "Beware of the gorilla: Effect of goal priming on inattentional blindness" (PDF) by Jean-Baptiste Legal and Fabrice Gabarrot.

• "THE SURVIVAL TRIANGLE WITH DR. ALEXIS ARTWOHL: CHAPTER 2- COGNITIVE ISSUES IN LETHAL SELF DEFENSE INCIDENTS"--CCW Safe. The link is to an embedded video. However, there are some notes included summarizing the video, including this bit on attention or lack thereof:

        Selective attention means that we think we are paying attention, but research shows that we only pay attention to a very small part of our environment at any time. 

       If our being is focused on event A, the less we will notice around event A. This is called inattentional blindness. You can look at a face and have a ten minute conversation with a certain person and not know what shirt color that person was wearing, because you tuned it out. This is a common phenomenon that does not just happen in critical events, but it happens to people all the time. 

      Even the events we do pay attention to, we may not be to recollect. This also happens with selective hearing, where the human becomes less reactive to sound by paying more attention to visual works. 

      Officers in shootings often don’t hear gunfire or screams. Victims of car wrecks recall silence on the moment of impact. Other sounds may sound amplified for unknown reasons; this causes confusion and can really impact the human memory. This will cause the memory to not match witnesses, tapes, and other evidence. 

       It is very important to stick with what you know, and to not fill in the gaps to please any person or interviewer. Try not to make up things under pressure to fill in the gaps of your memory. You do not need to feel any social pressure to state things you do not know are true. Dr. Alexis Artwohl illustrates that your truth may or may not match reality. 

• "Range Testing the Ruger LCR"--by Marcus Wynne at Active Response Training. Wynne lives in Minnesota, and so he carries a pocket gun in his out layer that he can access, if necessary, more quickly than he can a larger carry gun under his outdoor clothing. In this article, he evaluates the Ruger LCR revolver and various .38 Special loadings, giving his evaluation of each of the different cartridges, and some thoughts on speed loaders. He recommends replacing the factory Hogue grip with a Rogers grip. 

       By the way, as Greg Ellifritz notes, Wynne also writes novels that take advantage of his background, including as a Federal Air Marshal. I've read a few of his novels, including No Other Option, The Sword of Michael (which I review here), and just finished Warrior In The Shadows (an interesting weave of modern crime action-adventure and Aborigine magic). I have just started reading the first book of his Wylde trilogy. I'm not very good at reviewing fiction, so just let me say this: I like his books. He knows his topics, including the firearms and unarmed combat stuff, and it shows in the books. In fact, I think you can pick up some tips. Character development is good--in fact, in No Other Option, the villain really gave me the creeps. So, give them a try.

• "Barrel Twist Rates: Can They Impact Bullet Expansion?"--Shooting Illustrated.  Key point:

Simply put, if you don’t have the proper spin rate on your bullet then it may not arrive on target in the first place, and even if it does, the bullet may hit your target at an undesirable angle to the bullet design. Remember, bullets, even the expensive ones, are designed to hit their targets nose first. Bullets which hit angles too high or low, left or right, or even sideways aren’t going to perform as designed by the engineers.

•  "'Sightless Self-Defense' Can Help You Stay Safe"--Vision Aware. The article is mostly about a jujitsu based self-defense program put together by Stan Miller to teach self-defense to blind people. It concludes with some tips to keep yourself safe.
• You probably are aware of the general events surrounding Jayme Closs--her parents were murdered and she was kidnapped by some sicko, finally able to escape when the perpetrator left to visit his mother: "Neighbor Who Came To Jayme Closs’ Aid: ‘We Were Armed And Ready’ For Suspect To Come Looking"--Weasel Zippers. Key point (quoting from a Fox News article):

“When our neighbor Jeanne came in with Jayme, she said: ‘Get a gun. We don’t know if he’s after us,’” Kasinskas said. “So we were armed and ready in case this person showed up.”[…]

• Correlation is not causation: "Higher rates of gun ownership drives up youth suicides: Every 10% spike in firearms equates to 27% increase in children taking their lives, first-of-its kind study finds"--Daily Mail. How do we know that the researcher's conclusions are questionable? Well, first of all, it doesn't hold up internationally--otherwise, the United States would have the highest suicide rate among teens in the world. A paper published in World Psychiatry, for instance, noted that "[t]here were 13 countries with suicide rates [of teens] 1.5 times or more above the mean: these included Sri Lanka, with the highest suicide rate, followed by Lithuania, Russia and Kazakhstan." The United States wasn't even that group of countries with rates 1.5 times the mean or higher. In fact, countries such as Canada, Australia, Austria, Singapore, Ireland, Finland, and New Zealand all had higher rates of teen suicides than the United States.

       An article from the Journal of Child and Adolescent Behavior looks at suicide among children and adolescents and found that "the highest suicide rates for children and adolescent in both sexes were mainly found in the former Soviet Union and Central and South America." Again, the U.S. isn't even among the top 10. The article cites as causes of suicide: social and political unrest or turbulence, poverty, and loss of cultural values and traditional beliefs. Hmmm. What has been happening to poor, rural communities in the United States?

       Within the United States, there are significant differences in suicide rates based on gender and race. For instance, the suicide rates among blacks and Hispanics are fairly low, while suicides among whites are much higher, and those for American Indians and Eskimo are more than 3 times that of blacks. Thus, we should expect states with large populations of Native Americans and/or whites to have higher suicide rates than those with large black and Latino populations. And, in fact, we see that with Alaska, South Dakota and Wyoming having the highest suicide rates among adolescents. 

        While we are told that overall gun ownership as a percentage of the population has been falling, "[s]uicide rates rose in Utah and every other state but Nevada between 1999 and 2016, with big increases seen across age, gender, race and ethnicity, according to a report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention." Well, I'm pretty sure that Nevada didn't see a precipitous drop in the rate of gun ownership during that time frame. However, Obama was president for much of that period. Maybe his presidency caused more teens to kill themselves?

       Finally, firearms may be a means of suicide, but they are not the cause of suicide. Australia, for instance, saw the number of suicide by firearms decline after it enacted sweeping bans on firearms, but its overall suicide rate continued to rise, with males apparently substituting hanging for shooting themselves.

"5 African Nations Most in Debt to China"--China Uncensored (13 min.)

• "China’s corporate default storm continues to rage at the start of 2019 after a record year"--South China Morning Post. From the lede: "Two weeks into 2019, five Chinese companies are already likely to default on 3.5 billion yuan (US$446.25 million) worth of debt, after a record US$17 billion default wave took the country by storm in 2018 amid a worsening economic slowdown and soaring refinancing costs facing the cash-starved private sector."

Also:

      Zhang Ming, chief economist for Ping An Securities, said China’s credit bond default risks are likely to rise further in 2019.

      He said the defaults were likely to expand from manufacturing firms to smaller property developers and local government’s financing platforms this year.

• "Tucker Carlson’s dangerous wedge."--Dalrock. Dalrock begins by noting that "[l]ast week Tucker Carlson broke a carefully guarded conservative taboo and called out our elites for their role in destroying [A]merican families." He continues:

So far, no one is openly questioning the wisdom of the legal mechanisms we’ve put in place to actually destroy families, or the legal incentives we’ve put in place to encourage women to destroy (or never form) their own families.  We replaced marriage with a new central family model, the child support model, without discussing the wisdom of this change, or even acknowledging that we did so.  So far no one, not even Carlson and Wilcox, has had the poor taste to bring this up.  But this is the real danger of the discussion.  If we are allowed to discuss the responsibility our elites have in destroying the family, and are allowed to proceed with the assumption that public policy should encourage stable marriages, sooner or later we will get around to the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room.  Our elites need to shut this conversation down, and they need to shut it down fast.  So far they haven’t been able to do so.

• Related: "Sears employees upset over Lampert’s bid win"--Fox Business.  

       "Eddie Lampert didn't save Sears, he ran it into the ground. No one thinks their job is safe under his leadership," Lily Wang, deputy director of United for Respect's Rise Up Retail said in a statement to FOX Business.

* * * 

       The non-profit retail community group notes that since Lampert took control of Sears in 2005, he has repeatedly sold off Sears’ most profitable assets to corporations that he controls and “has major stakes in,” earning him more than $1 billion in the process.

       “Under Lampert’s control, Sears has shelled out $6 billion in stock buybacks to pay out to investors and shareholders instead of paying down its debt or investing in its store infrastructure and the workforce,” the group added.

• "BP just discovered a billion barrels of oil in Gulf of Mexico"--CNBC. All apparently in U.S. territorial waters.
• Camp of the Saints: "ANOTHER caravan bound for the U.S. is formed by Salvadoran migrants - as 1,700 Hondurans cross the border into Guatemala after being granted visas"--Daily Mail. From the photographs, it appears to be about 90% men of military age.
• "What I Saw at a Yellow Vest Protest in France"--The American Conservative. The author reports:

Estimates hold that around 32,000 yellow vests marched on January 12 throughout France, including a full 8,000 in Paris, up some 6,000 from turnout estimates last Saturday. In Rouen, there were 3,500 yellow vests taking part. In total, 80,000 police were deployed Saturday to meet the protesters. Although the numbers of yellow vests have been waning overall since the uprising started last November following a fuel tax hike, enthusiasm appeared strong and aggression was not lacking.

The protesters are still from the whole of the political spectrum.

• "American Apartheid:  Resurrecting Communism’s South African Playbook – In America"--Wilder, Wealthy and Wise. The author, Wilder, came across an article written by Tayari Jones, a Black Nationalist, and decided to go down the rabbit hole to trace the philosophical roots of Jones anti-white message ... which led him to the writings of Joe Slovo who was influential on the African National Congress (ANC) during its battle against South Africa's apartheid era government. Key point:

In our culture, today, we actively have Marxists attempting to undermine the fabric of our society using a variety of weapons, and especially trying to create a majority coalition of disaffected people to destabilize society to create, in effect, an American version of apartheid to fight.  This is one reason that illegal immigration is actively supported – it brings in people entirely unrelated to the current society.  Outside of the future leftist votes, this group is used to help create additional fragmentation in the country.

This ties in well with what Bruce D. Porter discusses in his book, War and the Rise of the State as he discusses the rise of totalitarian states based on fascism, Nazism, and Communism: that those states require a state of war to form and exist, and, in particular, a war against internal enemies. As Porter observes, Hitler admitted that if the Jews had not existed, he would have had to invent someone like them. Only, this time, white conservative men will play the role of the Jews.

• Related: "'F**k These Homophobes': Karen Pence Demonized for Teaching at Christian School"--PJ Media. According to the left, if you believe in Christian morals, you are "an extremist bigot" who is "unfit to be around kids."

• From Leeds in England: "Couple ‘smeared in blood’ caught ‘having sex in woods surrounded by chanting women’"--Metro. Sounds like something out of a Dan Brown novel.
• I wonder if this would work to spoil facial recognition: "Neutrogena will 3D print custom face masks based on buyers’ skin measurements"--The Verge. 
• "Could Solar Radiation Pressure Explain 'Oumuamua's Peculiar Acceleration?"--The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Volume 868, Number 1. Oumuamua was an object generally believed to have come from intersteller space. One of the peculiarities of it, besides its brightness, was an unusual acceleration after it had rounded the sun--something that could not be accounted for by its trajectory, nor was there any outgassing observed that could account for it. The authors of this paper suggest: "We explore the possibility that the excess acceleration results from solar radiation pressure. The required mass-to-area ratio is (m/A) ≈ 0.1 g cm−2. For a thin sheet this requires a thickness of ≈0.3–0.9 mm." That thin of material implies something artificial--a light sail--as Avi Loeb discusses in an interview with Der Spiegel. There are, however, many others that disagree and believe that it is just another hunk of rock or ice.
• "The shuttle flies again! NASA gives go-ahead for 'Dream Chaser' mini spaceplane"--Daily Mail. NASA has approved Sierra Nevada Corp's space plane for production, and it could be used to ferry cargo to the International Space Station as early as late 2020.
• A reminder that we live in the 21st Century: "Skincredible! Researchers create an electronic bandage that helps wounds heal FOUR TIMES faster"--Daily Mail. It uses electrical impulses to stimulate cellular growth.